Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing

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Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.This is sort of a bonus recommendation. Though this book is fiction (and was at the time extraordinarily popular — and eventually a bad movie), it is actually quite good. Not only that, it covers a few themes that are quite important to the Civil War. One is the home guard, which patrolled for deserters and draft dodgers (on both sides) with brutal effectiveness. The war basically descended into gang violence in the middle states. Second, it includes the Battle of the Crater, which Inman fought in. It’s not very well known but incredibly strange. Third, the disillusionment of Confederate soldiers at the end of the war. People forget how utterly beat the South was (in large part due to the strategies of Sherman) and how this made many people realize how utterly bankrupt the cause was. However, if one reads Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing , by John Thompson, (Polity, 2021), that casual assumption is challenged. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo.Considered one of the definitive memoirs of the Vietnam War, it is, “Simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” He was well aware that his job was to kill as many people as possible and he tells this to the reader, who needs to know it. His observations are jarring and uncomfortable. “I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses — a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.” Wow. The feature version also pioneered internet releases when they were still uncommon (in 2001), streaming on a pay per view basis on the Cinemapop media portal. The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian.Arrian gifted us with two amazing documents: one was the lectures of the philosopher Epictetus and the second was his history of the wars of Alexander the Great. Alexander is a wonderful example of the toxic burden of ambition. Yes, it brought him to the edges of the conquered world — but that’s also where he died, likely murdered by his own men. He had no real purpose for it all, no real plan or true empire — it was just fight, win, own, fight, win, own until the end (and in the end, as Epictetus observed, he still died and was buried like the rest of us). I’m not saying there are no other lessons, but this is the most salient one. Other lessons include: leading from the front and the importance of speed, surprise, and boldness. Another great book on Alexander is Steven Pressfield’s The Virtues of War.

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.I prefer this book to The Art of War. Technically, Musashi was not a general or a soldier but a samurai warrior. But given his profession, it is safe to say he was in a constant state of war. He fought in duels with the best warriors in the world, often all at the same time. His lessons on the difference between the seeing eye and the perceiving eye are good. He too talks of knowing the enemy better than their own commanders — so that your moves actually command and direct them where you want them to go. This book has many philosophical lessons that transcend sword fighting. You’ll love it.

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BookWars received the Best Documentary Award upon its world premiere at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival. The film was also nominated for an IFP Gotham Award. Losing the War by Lee Sandlin. Okay, this one isn’t a book — it’s just an essay. But this essay is better than almost any full book ever written on WWII. It may in fact be one of the best essays ever written (seriously). I’m not going to even bother to try to say more than that. Just read it, trust me. This could be cut into a third and still deliver its message. Much of the history cited are well-known and unnecessary, like how books were published, oral tradition of stories, founding of tech giants, ebooks, audiobooks, iTunes. A simple line description would suffice. Data is dated, some dead. Mitchell, Elvis (9 June 2000). "FILM REVIEW; Selling Books on the Street in a Quality-of-Life Town". The New York Times. BookWars Bookwars Directed by Jason Rosette". Archived from the original on 2011-06-06 . Retrieved 2009-09-24. Matt Zoller Seitz/NY Press

BookWars Bookwars Directed by Jason Rosette". www.nypress.com. Archived from the original on 6 June 2011 . Retrieved 12 January 2022. BookWars has screened at festivals, theatrical venues, and broadcast outlets including: NHK (Japan), SVT (Sweden) Sveriges Television, PBS, (US), Metrochannels (US) MSG Metro Channels, Book Television (Canada), Arte/ZDF Arte (France and Germany), The Florida Film Festival, The Kansas City Film Jubilee, Facets, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Danish National Film Institute, Brotfabrik (Berlin), the 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle, amongst others.Again, casual assumptions might have been that these trade publishers should have seen the digital disruption in scholarly publishing during the ’90s and moved more rapidly to rethink their business models. Thompson’s book explains some of the initial paralysis, which is all the more reason why I see it as a worthwhile title for inclusion in those academic library collections supporting graduate programs in either publishing or library science.

Primary influences in the making of the movie were the Beat classic film, Pull My Daisy and other street-level compositions by filmmaker Robert Frank and various works from the New American Cinema. The narration style was adopted from 1930-40’s American gangster and film noir movies, and some Western genre elements were included as well – particularly in the conceptual story component of a “man heading out West to start anew”. Note: I have them roughly organized by chronology and era but feel free to skip around. I know I certainly did. A book and audiobook titled 10,000 Miles to Go: An American Filmmaking Odyssey, [4] about the unusual physical and creative process behind the making of BookWars, was published in 2015. In the closing moments of BookWars, the narrator admits that after all the recent problems with the city, he has grown restless; he realizes that he wants to do something different, and wants to change his occupation at last. A single massive rainstorm is enough to convince him to give up his street bookselling activities.In terms of predicting the future of the book, Thompson explains that speculating is hard to do. However, reflecting on recent patterns, he suggests that book publishing ‘will not be a one-way shift from print to digital […] but rather co-existent cultures of print and digital’ (426). Book Wars is well worth reading to understand where the book was in the latter part of the twentieth century and where it is headed well into the twenty-first. It is clearly here to stay, on our shelves as well as on our screens.

Thompson does a brilliant job of exploring the advent of technology and the reaction and interaction of publishers when facing the inevitability of eBooks. This was a fascinating look at the world of books and how the evolution of digital technology has changed the publishing world and its' outlook over the years! Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel by David Fraser. It’s going to feel weird reading a book about a German general in WWII but for Rommel we must make an exception. Yes, he fought for a terrible cause. But he did so brilliantly — as a soldier, strategist, and leader. His victories in North Africa were the stuff of legend, and had the US and British troops not ultimately had better resources, the whole thing might have turned out very differently. You cannot read about Rommel and not like and admire the man. I’m saying this so you’ll be prepared and ready to remind yourself that that doesn’t excuse his actions. But you can still learn from them.There’s no question it is a good thing a full generation has passed in the West without requiring the majority of young people to feel the full brunt of war. War is a terrible thing (which, as Robert E. Lee once said, is good because otherwise men might grow too fond of it). To not need to experience it is a stroke of fortune that the previous generations were not gifted with. Because of the detail and analytics about traditional publishing, this is a book I have already recommended to many eBook-centric and digital-only indie authors looking to understand from across the divide that still exists between traditional publishing and the self-publishing communities. Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. In Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, John B. Thompson takes the reader on a wild and exciting ride exploring the changes that have turned book publishing on its head over the last 30 years, with the development of many new technologies that readers may have come to take for granted or never considered. Book Wars offers up well-crafted chapters on the social changes that have arisen affecting reading as well as trade publishing. Trade is considered to be both fiction and non-fiction for general readers (xi). Many of the chapters focus on specific technologies, including the rise and decline of the e-reader, the increasing popularity of the audiobook and the fascination with self-publishing and crowdfunding for writers.